Friday Night Lights

Last Friday, somewhat to my surprise and slightly against my initial inclinations, I found myself at the detention center in Camp Crame, visiting the detainees from the Manila Peninsula incident of the previous day. I had come to act as counsel in the inquest proceedings set for that evening, representing Dodong Nemenzo, the former UP President, and a man I personally held in the highest esteem, both for his ideas and his ideals.

While waiting for the inquest to start (it was scheduled for 8 PM, but consistent with typical “Filipino-time,” actually began almost two hours later) I stayed inside the detention center and talked with some of the other detainees. Far from being the dour and serious affairs most people would probably expect (after all, we were in a detention area in the middle of a military camp, surrounded by several thousand armed police officers, and the people I was with stood accused, rightly or wrongly, of attempting to overthrow the government), the conversation was, for the most part, light and even humorous. A perfect complement, I suppose, to the surreal fact that from the Crame detention center, you could clearly see the lights from the bars and restaurants in nearby Greenhills. This probably stands as proof positive that we Filipinos are a cheerful, or at the very least, a resilient people — we can find it in ourselves to laugh and trade bad puns while undergoing detention for rebellion.

Of course, not all the conversations I had that Friday evening involved joking around. One which stands out in particular is the talk I had with the sometimes admired, oftentimes reviled icon of anti-administration sentiment, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV.

I must confess at the outset that when I came to Crame that Friday, I did not really count myself as a Trillanes fan. I mean, yeah, I was thrilled that more than 11 million Filipinos voted him into the Senate last May (if the COMELEC hadn’t “misplaced” my voter record, I would probably have even cast my lot with them). But this was really more because I saw him as a symbol of resistance, rather than actually agreeing with the actions he had chosen to undertake. Taking over a luxury residence in Makati, and then surrendering after 23 hours is not exactly my notion of effective political action. And the events of the previous day had not exactly done much to lessen my cynicism. If anything, Manila Pen in 2007 seemed a smaller-scale, less successful (if there is such a thing) version of Oakwood in 2003.

That said, however, despite a full supply of cynicism and lawyerly skepticism, I came away from Crame last Friday, counting myself as a Trillanes fan.

I do not mean that I agree with what he did (however various observers may choose to construe it). But I’d like to think that I at least came to understand in part why he did it. And it is for those reasons that I have come to admire the man.

What struck me most was Trillanes’ overwhelming, overpowering sincerity. The man is a believer. Not simply in the righteousness of his own cause, after all, even Jovito Palparan is probably completely convinced of his own virtue, but more significantly, in the capacity of Filipinos to recognize what is right and act accordingly. Responding to a point raised about the difficulty in getting people to mass up at a distant, inaccessible Makati hotel on a rainy Thursday, Trillanes quite simply stated that he believed that “people should be willing to walk a mile in the rain for their country.” Up to now, I am awed by such faith in us Filipinos.

While many of us may criticize the impracticality, or even the outright naivety, of this view, we have to acknowledge its compelling character. For two and a half years, efforts to stand up to the GMA regime — a regime that has consistently proven itself to be ruthless, corrupt, and utterly bereft of moral or legal scruples — have been bedeviled by questions of practicality and expediency. Who, or what, do we replace her with? How do we go about it? Who do we accept as allies? Without necessarily dismissing the legitimacy of these concerns, I think the time has come to ask ourselves if in focusing on the logistics of the struggle, we have wavered in our conviction to wage it in the first place.

And maybe that is why, last Friday, I became a Trillanes fan. For despite all our condescension towards his “political naivety,” and all our snide remarks regarding the “inept” way he carried out the Manila Peninsula affair, he remains a man who dared to act on the outrage that still roars so fiercely in our hearts.